Niku is compelling but I voted for sharks with legs mostly because I love it and I'm pretty sure I didn't get to vote for it in earlier brackets and IoG is my favorite by a mile from that trilogy even though brackets made me vote against it earlier.

Yeah weirdly I think that Soul Blazer and Terranigma are both better games than Illusion of Gaia, but I like Illusion of Gaia more than both of them. But I am literally arbitrarily voting in every single round over what feels right to me whether I am contradicting myself from an earlier round or not.

Terranigma > SoulBlazer > IoG seems to be the standard ranking, although I have a special emotional affection for IoG myself. It did a lot of things storywise that I had never experienced in a video game before, like slowly coming to understand a person you thought you hated by slowly dying of malnutrition on a tiny raft together, or desperately trying to fight off vampires while your best friend is strapped to a bomb, or <Hamlet>. FF6 is everybody's go-to for storytelling in the 16-bit era but IoG never gets enough credit for being both emotionally engaging and totally unique (read: fucking weird).

IoG has that bit where you wander into a random building and the dire music cuts in as you witness slaves weaving rugs, and an NPC tells you not to concern yourself; people being destined for this is part of life.

I guess that thing still making me uncomfortable at 34 is kind of an accomplishment?

FF6 tells a good fantasy story. IoG tells a story that cuts deep because it's goddamn real and grounded as fuck, as much as it can be. For a series with transforming swordsman, blue goo spacemen, magical powers, it more tells a story about how you don't inherently become the hero of a fantasy adventure when those happen. Real lives, with grounded problems, still fucking happen while you're spinning your flute.

My JRPG trash tendencies are clear.Though, I did think that the egoRaptor's discussion of what makes Super Castlevania an unusual sequel to the original Castlevania was neat.Or at least, I liked the sweary cartoon he did to go along with it.

Super Castlevania 4. Super Mario RPG has really fun RPG mechanics, but it is almost painfully rough around the edges these days. The pre-rendered graphics, the shitty shitty Square additions to the universe, that fucking bizarre mine cart section -- it's a weird damn game in a way that doesn't always pay off well. Mario and Luigi and Paper Mario both refined the primordial soup into something actually good, and there's not a lot of reason to go back to the original curiosity outside of curiosity. Castlevania 4 is pretty unique as far as Castlevania games go. It's a mode 7 clusterfuck and not the best Castlevania game by a long shot. I don't think it really deserves to be in the top 16 at all, but I'm not really sure SMRPG does either. In the end I'll take a giant tongue skull over Booster, I guess.